WeRelate/supporters

Supporters

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Opponents

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  • Not so great. Even if you exclude living people, there are severe legal issues about dead people. Genealogic data could only be useful for people dead 70 years ago or more. For other poeple, there are privacy issues about the kind of info you'll allow inserting about someone that cannot defend its personality. If this is just to collect data about civil records, this data will be subject to many national laws. They are NOT extensible internationaly and CANNOT be free knowledge (notably the licences allowing modifications will be incompatible with these laws).
Seriously, such project should remain within private projects monitored by authorized people that take full responsability and audit the data they republish under specific authorization or legal rights, but this right is NOT freely transferable. I strongly oppose this project, except for people died more than 1 century ago (that must NOT be linked to their successors living or not : the names of children must be hidden, and given mean life time about 75 years, this means that NO birth later than 175 years ago should be listed, if we don't know that these successors are dead since more than 100 years). And which kind of data would be useful ? We are not focusing on creating online fac simile backups of national people registries.
Anyway this project is extremely badly named, it should be more descriptive with something like "GeneaWiki". May be some parts of Wikidata should be transfered here, using the same wikidata extension, but with specific visual tools to help building and navigating in genealogic trees. And with tools facilitating the exchange of information between existing communities of genealogists (the wiki format is not the best option for massive imports of lots of hostoric trees, and genealogists will want to track the original sources, which are much more important than the data themselves).
Not that even if these are facts and facts are not copyrightable by themselves (in US), this does not mean that there's no private rights applicable because the project is all about personal data.
verdy_p (talk) 05:45, 27 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  •   Oppose --Timmaexx (talk) 23:04, 30 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  •   Oppose This seems to be a poorly structured, poor quality, and filterless duplication of what we're already doing. There are genealogical diagrams for notable families on Wikipeida already. There are biographies for notable people and write-ups of notable places on Wikipedia already. I don't see a value in a WMF supported project to start tracking non-notable people and non-notable families. When I look at the selected content, I see things like this write up of a domestic servant. I'm not saying that there isn't a value to a project like WeRelate. Plenty of people are interested in ancestry tracking, albeit mostly tracking their own ancestries or those of famous people. What I am saying though is that I don't see a value in adopting this as a WMF project. Aside from the grave privacy concerns that comments like BlueRasberry's (about bringing in genetic data) raise, I simply don't think that this project fits well within the WMF's mission. Does it provide knowledge? Yes. Does it provide broadly usable knowledge? No. The WMF needs to concentrate its resouces on projects that have the potential to do the greatest amount of good, and certainly doesn't need to have one of every type of knowledge medium/source if a good case for having it hasn't been made. I don't see a good case for having this, and so I am in opposition to adopting it. Sven Manguard (talk) 04:16, 5 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  •   Oppose - due to problems with reliable sourcing. There are few fields of scholarship, historically, where the signal-to-noise ratio is worse. --Orange Mike (talk) 21:20, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • A genealogical wiki is a valid project for the Wikimedia Foundation. The nominated website, werelate.org, is not suited for inclusion in WM. This is based on about 4 months of use, in 2 periods. There is a right-wing anti-intellectual tone on Werelate manifested in policies concerning display and importation of data. As an example, look for the country specified in President Obama's birthplace: http://www.werelate.org/wiki/Person:Barack_Obama_(2). (check the history before 9 May 2014 if there is a country other than Hawaii). Some vocal Werelate contributers would support display of Hawaii as the country of Obama's birth based on an unwritten rule of the site regarding place names (see discussion here: http://www.werelate.org/wiki/User_talk:Susan_Irish#Anachronistic_places_.5B15_March_2014.5D ). An additional problem of the site is that there was no vetting of imported genealogical data when the site started. This mass of uncurated data still hangs over the site. The current import policy is reactionary with arbitrary restrictions. In summary, the culture of this site is unsuitable for incorporation within Wikimedia. I spoke with a representative of the ACPL about this site. She was reluctant to bring it up, and when I did she had a look of depressed disappointment and offered no support of the site. It seems that genealogists interested in a reflective, intellectual community have already abandoned Werelate. Ggpauly (talk) 01:50, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]